from the New Yorker

“[The American public] sips its coffee and reads of its soldiers administering the ‘water cure’ to rebels; of how water with handfuls of salt thrown in to make it more efficacious, is forced down the throats of the patients until their bodies become distended to the point of bursting; of how our soldiers then jump on the distended bodies to force the water out quickly so that the ‘treatment’ can begin all over again. The American Public takes another sip of its coffee and remarks, ‘how very unpleasant!’…But where is that vast national outburst of astounded horror which an old-fashioned America would have predicted at the reading of such news? Is it lost somewhere in the 8,000 miles that divide us from the scenes of these abominations? Is it led astray by the darker skins of the alien race among which these abominations are perpetrated? Or is it rotted away by that inevitable demoralization which the wrong-doing of a great nation must inflict on the consciences of the least of its citizens?”
—The New York World, in 1902, on torture committed by American soldiers in the Philippines